Rama Adithya Varanasi
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States
This paper presents Saharaline, an intervention designed to provide collective social support for teachers in low-income schools. Implemented as a WhatsApp-based helpline, Saharaline enables teachers to reach out for personalized, long-term assistance with a wide range of problems and stressors, including pedagogical, technological, and emotional challenges. Depending on the support needed, teachers' requests are routed to appropriate domain experts--- staff employed by educational non-profit organizations who understand teachers' on-the-ground realities---who offer localized and contextualized assistance. Via a three-month exploratory deployment with 28 teachers in India, we show how Saharaline's design enabled a collective of diverse education experts to craft and deliver localized solutions that teachers could incorporate into their practice. We conclude by reflecting on the efficacy of our intervention in low-resource work contexts and provide recommendations to enhance collective social support interventions similar to Saharaline.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642617
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2024.acm.org/)